


our souls between the silence

by goldafterglow



Category: Prospect (2018)
Genre: Angst, Arguing, BUT THEN!!!, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Fights, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gun Violence, Hair, Hair Brushing, I Love You, Love Confessions, Near Death, Near Death Experiences, Other, Robbery, Sleep, Sleepy Cuddles, Thiefs, Yelling, brushing with your fingers, it's not hair brushing really, so many tags hgksjdfhg, they yell at each other :(
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:21:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29852496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldafterglow/pseuds/goldafterglow
Summary: You are the token of Ezra’s love, but Ezra desires to be desired.
Relationships: Ezra (Prospect 2018)/Reader, Ezra (Prospect 2018)/You
Comments: 1
Kudos: 21





	our souls between the silence

**Author's Note:**

> Another fic I transferred from my tumblr. This was the prompt:
> 
> cafuné: the act of running your fingers through the hair of someone you love; a Brazilian Portuguese word that has no direct English translation

Ezra is touch-starved.

He has grown accustomed to wearing that heavy yellow suit, fabric thick like his despair, always one extra stone to cross before anything could truly make contact with his skin. The last time he really felt anything, he was losing his right arm. The last time he’d been touched and had been able to feel it, he’d been completely traumatized by it. He’d made a ghost out of a part of him that he trusted so dearly, a part of him that held so many secrets, and then abandoned it to rot on a moon now so distant. If only memories could be abandoned in the same way.

But now he’s got you, a soul almost as lost as he is. When he met you he was emotionally destitute as it was, with nothing to offer but a pod to stay in and a conversation, but you’d been so eager to accept him because you were just as lonely. It’s hard prospecting alone, a miserable existence that occasionally made you wish someone would come and try to steal your spoils in hopes that at the least, they’d talk to you. He didn’t know it, but Ezra didn’t really need to have anything to offer besides that conversation. You would’ve stuck to him like craters on the moon just for talking your ear off about how you should be careful not to go frolicking in the Green unarmed. Even if it was a little patronizing, you would’ve given up your harvest at that point to hear someone be concerned for your well being like that. How fortunate that you don’t have to.

As Ezra has grown fond of you, that timid, traumatized ember of his desire to touch skin has begun to grow into a bonfire, catching onto the dry leaves and splintered branches of his love for you as it consumes him, fills his helmet until he can’t see or breathe in anything but your golden fumes. It’s become oppressive, painful as his ears get to hear you and his eyes get to see you but all three of his other senses are left blindsided; Ezra’s fingers are the angriest.

But Ezra is patient. Perhaps he isn’t a good man, and he certainly doesn’t fancy himself as one, but he is good to you. He doesn’t want to tell you those deep cravings he finds himself suppressing, about that fire he’s struggling to keep at bay with his own tears, because he has something so good with you. He gets to spend time with you, gets to scream his thoughts into your chest, has the luxury of wishing you blueberry syrup dreams every night, and he doesn’t want to be too greedy because your cup is already so empty. But the brush of your fingers against his as you pass him the map feels like a sick joke, Venus’s cruel mockery.

Ezra has a strange relationship with relationships. He constantly seeks them out, searching for solace in the presence of other people, and yet for all the wanting he does he never seems to feel wanted. He knows that if his fate is up to the stars, he’ll never be wanted the way he needs other people, because fuck if he’s ever done a thing to deserve it. Ezra can only speak to the birds for so long before he begins to recognize that he is absolutely mad; he thrives off of human connection. But his tend to be so one-sided that sometimes he wonders if he even exists, if there’s a body for people to look at when he speaks or if he is just a lost spirit trying to possess real people with no idea that he can’t provide the same in return.

But Ezra needs you to want him.

You don’t really show any outstanding desire for him. He never catches your lingering gaze, never feels you turn to glance at him just to make sure he’s still there. He worries that he’s just a pair of ears to you, an open mic spewing thoughts for you to enjoy without wanting the man they belong to. He’s so sick of being used, of being a thing people spit in and then toss out. He’d felt a mutual companionship with Cee, but even she is gone now, and Ezra is once again left feeling disposable.

Ezra is utterly smitten with you and you don’t have a clue.

You don’t know how he watches you sleep, admiring the way your body melts into the cot and your bones turn to marshmallow, face soft and pliable. You don’t know how he turns around to watch you extract gems, enamored by your laser focus and razor-blade mind. You don’t know how he lights up when you interrupt him because he’s just said something that sparked a thought so pervasive in your mind that you can’t stand to hold it in. You don’t know how he thinks about nuzzling your neck when you’re feeling excited and holding your ear to his heart when you’re downcast, about kissing your forehead before you go to sleep and kissing your eyelids before you wake up. You’re completely oblivious.

And some nights, when you whine to him that you’re just not sleepy and the sandwoman herself couldn’t send you off, he picks up a novel of your choosing and reads to you quietly. He does voices, adds inflection, incorporates pauses; as though he were performing a one-man show for his favorite audience member, just for you. He’d do anything for you.

How could you know that Ezra has taken his delicate, fragile heart and placed it in your glass hands? His greatest fear is that one day, you’ll blindly squeeze, and his heart will weep blood as it shatters in your wake because you don’t care. Because you don’t want him.

The first time Ezra gets to feel you, you ask for it.

The day of prospecting is slow and tedious, but you have each other’s company to dull the thick molasses clogging up your veins and weighing heavy on your mind. The Sun’s heat distorts the atmosphere, draws swirls through your eyes and hangs anvils from the roots of your hair. The dig site is open and barren save for the buried root pearls, the nearest shade of green only visible in the surrounding forest. There is nothing here, not even tumbleweeds, and it makes you feel so isolated and yet so watched. Like the eyes of the distant trees are shrewdly observing you, waiting for you to trip so they can drag you away as your soft cheeks catch on the rocks in the dirt.

It’s not silent, but quiet - Ezra’s voice is soothing, his words always arriving in bulk but never loud, and the only time you’re ever inundated by sound is when you’re the one talking. Although there is nothing here, there is someone, and you feel like you may as well be dancing in the ditch because his company is irreplaceably ample and gleefully filling. He brings pastels to your neon world and creates an existence for you that is as magnificently muted as it is vivaciously vibrant. He’s turned your life into art and made everything so beautiful.

It’s during one of your long-winded responses that you notice Ezra is no longer tending to unveiling gems, his stature stiff and frozen in a way that sends fear down your spine like fractals. You turn your head to see that somewhat in the distance is a prospector, a stranger, and his thrower is charged and pointed - at you.

“Your aurelac,” he says, voice gruff and bitter, staining the shimmering mural you had been painting with Ezra just moments ago with his black acrylic. “Give me everything you have.” Your eyes go wide; everything? You’ve been toiling out here for fucking hours, barely able to sit upright out of fatigue. And you know this harvest means more to Ezra; every harvest since he lost his arm means more to him. It took him cycles to learn how to find utility in his left arm, and you’re still helping him get through his struggles, so you know Ezra will refuse him almost immediately, rapid truculence immediately coming to light.

You know it.

“It is not my intention to rouse agitation from you,” Ezra assures, loud and clear so as to not inspire suspicion. The thrower isn’t even fucking pointed at him; you want to scream at him to run, drop down, grab his thrower and forget about you, but you can’t do a thing but watch like a clock on a wall, ticking away until you inevitably break down.

The foreigner gets closer to you both - much closer. So close that you can practically smell his stench radiate towards you, and all the while Ezra is completely still. His hand isn’t even on his own thrower, the charged weapon hanging uselessly off his lower back. Your breathing gets louder, deafening, and you’re beginning to succumb to your dread.

“I won’t be ‘agitated’ if you hand me the harvest,” the stranger demands, his voice breathy and shaking. You feel like you’re going to choke, like you’re asphyxiating on your own oxygen as you hear the violent tap of a thrower getting pressed to your helmet, aimed right at your face. “I want you to pack the gems.”

Ezra looks completely defeated - compliant and silent, a hollow shell of himself with all of those insides you love so much scooped out and incinerated beyond recovery. “I’d appreciate if we-”

“Pack the gems,” he repeats, this time more stern and far more aggressive, his patience beginning to falter. “Or I’ll shoot her.”

Your face scrunches up tight, teeth biting your lower lip like talons into the soft of prey as you begin to truly realize what is happening: you’re about to die. Your lungs give out on you and your heart begins skipping beats, a weak tremor building through your body. Your eyes are wide as you stare at Ezra; he was never shy in revealing his past to you, always candid about his sins, so you know what to expect from him. You know what a man of words like him will do in this situation - negotiate.

“No need for aggression,” Ezra lets out politely, a nervous smile gracing his features as he tries to look as non-threatening as possible. “If you’ll allow me to fulfill your humble request, we can both diverge on our separate paths.” Somewhere in your trepidation you find it in yourself to be completely dumbfounded. Ezra, who shot at a child’s father over his day’s harvest from when he had both of his hands, is waving his white flag?

“Ezra-” you begin to protest, but he doesn’t let you get a word out.

“It’s alright, stardust,” he coos, already beginning to slowly approach the pile. “Everything will be just fine.”

As he turns around, the man seems to notice Ezra’s thrower dangling off his suit like nothing more than an ornament and is instantly threatened. Without warning, he roughly forces you around so that your back is against his chest and his elbow is around your neck, threatening to cut off your circulation. If you weren’t scared before, you could barely fucking see now. Your eyes shut close as you let out a pathetic whimper - a sound that breaks through Ezra’s resolve and stabs into hims harder than losing any amount of spoils ever could.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Ezra growls viscerally, his shoulders tensing as his features morph into a snarl. The prospector, clearly not familiar with violence or piracy, slams the barrel of his thrower against your helmet, so much that you could hear the plexiglass tremor around you. You let out a dry sob that mixed with the nervous shake in your captor’s throat, two paranoid wrecks serving as each other’s token of doom.

“Put the thrower down,” he says quickly, nodding downward. “I mean it. I’ll f-fucking kill her, I’ll shoot her right now.” Ezra’s eyes widen at the bellicose threat, carefully tossing the thrower down and away from him.

“I think it’s in your best interest that you not resort to violence,” Ezra cautions, but he can’t fool you; his voice is higher, his drawl thick and distorting the typical blue clarity of his words.

“Now the gems,” the land pirate adds, throat frantic. You stare in a lethal combination of terror and shock as you watch your passionate, territorial partner delicately place each gem in its separate compartment without indignance. You’re scared to turn your eyes lest you look over and see his spine laying next to him, torn out of his body.

So much labor in your hot suit under the flaming sun and yet it’s in this moment that you’re breathing harder than you have all day. Your bones clatter under your skin, your muscles shivering as you feel the press of the inside of an elbow against your pulsing jugular.

The next moments fly past you in blinding neon scars flashing beneath your retinas, and before you know it Ezra is handing a nearly full case to a complete and utter stranger, a thief.

“I’m inclined to forfeit the fruits of my and my partner’s labors under one very important condition,” Ezra confirms. “You must release my partner from your throes.”

“Ezra, stop,” you beg. You can hear his nagging voice like a song, his stupid fucking tongue telling you how “risky and naive it is to be out in the greens unarmed”, like the soundtrack to the most brilliant irony because this idiot space cowboy was trying to negotiate terms unarmed with a man who may very well be as ravenous for blood as he is for money.

“Do you concur?” Ezra presses again. The man’s patience is flowing dry, and Ezra seems to be running a match right along it.

“Fuck - yes, just h-hand it over,” he says, releasing your neck to reach out for the case. Ezra eyes him carefully as you try to stay as quiet as possible, trying to silence your fear. You watch helplessly as one greedy hand exchanges with another, and suddenly you’re being forced into Ezra’s embrace. You’re practically sputtering, whipping your head around to watch as a stranger runs off into the cover of the trees with your hard-earned harvest.

“Starlight, please look at me,” came a voice like caramel, sweet and smooth and so gently tugging at the tattered edges of your attention. But you are still shaking, completely bewildered as you turned to stare at your savior as a new feeling began to fill you - rage.

“What the fuck was that?” you spit, words full of thorns and acid. “Putting your thrower down? Trying to push his buttons? Forfeiting our entire goddamn harvest?”

“I veto the notion of remorse,” Ezra states simply. He doesn’t have a cell of regret in his body, and he isn’t about to back down because you’ve raised your tone at him.

“He could’ve killed you!” you shout, any shame having flown out the atmosphere and taking your logic and reasoning with it. Tears of fury swell in your eyes as your liquid frustration pours down your cheeks. “Why did you do that? Why?”

“Because I’d rather sacrifice my own life than yours.”

He waits a moment, watching your mouth slowly close as he feels his eyes begin to sting like knives are trying to pop out of them, and he puts every last ounce of energy towards keeping his salt water at bay. There is nothing now; nobody but the two of you, no sound but your mangled breathings, nothing to look at but each other.

Oh.

“Please sweet girl, let’s just return to the pod,” Ezra pleads; his voice is softer now, more gentle as he tries to reel you back in. He doesn’t want to push you away; god he’s never wanted that. But he won’t apologize for the crack in his sternum after realizing you were in danger. He’ll never repent for the sobs he kept at bay as he watched you shake and shiver in another man’s arms, so mortal and morbid and god damn scared. He’s had his fair share of trauma, but he’s never had death dangle someone like you in front of his face in such proximity, so intimately.

So close.

You’re entirely prostrated, sniffles racking through your body as the adrenaline begins to empty from your blood vessels and give you that hollow feeling, the turgor pressure of your mind dropping. So you nod weakly, unable to get another word out as you trek back in something eerier than steel and lead, something more alarming than screams: silence.

When you finally crawl into the pod, it’s pitch black outside. You and Ezra are quick to strip out of the suit, eager to feel the air on your clothed, aching limbs. You don’t see Ezra again until later that night - early morning - freshly bathed and yet still so dirty.

You look at Ezra with pitiful eyes, sitting on his cot with a journal on the bedside table and a pen in his hand. He’s scribbling away, and furiously so; you know he has a lot to say, and he didn’t get the chance to say any of it to you. You want to hold him, tell him how grateful you are for his company and how sorry you are for yelling at him, but thinking is pointless around Ezra; he can read your eyes just as well.

You didn’t know you were on such good terms with Ezra yet. Shit, you haven’t ever even touched him, not even a shake of bare hands. You’d never even thought about it, completely oblivious to his lingering gazes and wide, needy eyes. But you do know that Ezra’s feelings come to him fast and hard, railing him like a bullet train. Perhaps you’re being too hard on him, but you can’t stop pondering how he could care for you so quickly.

You sit next to him wordlessly, scooting back so that your back is flat against the wall, holding your head up and keeping your eyes forward. Ezra stops writing. Not because he doesn’t want you to see; to him, it’s no less of a contribution to candid discourse than spoken word. But Ezra is fucking exhausted and you’re close enough that he can feel you warmth radiating into his nerves, and he wants to bask in it. So he sits straight up on the cot, back against the wall, right next to you. Another cruel twist of Kevva’s knife in his heart; putting your raw skin so close to him but not giving him the willpower to touch it - the one thing he’s wanted the moment he’d heard your voice. Perhaps Ezra is weaker than he thinks.

“You instilled quite some fear into my chest, firefly,” he whispers, chuckle airy like the breeze that his words float on. You don’t move at the sound of him, your sleepy wet eyes focused on the cabinet handle in front of you. You aren’t an idiot; you know this man beside you. He can laugh and smile all he wants but none of it masks his residual terror, that small bit of toxic fumes that he can’t expel from his lungs. “I don’t imagine I’ve ever been so tightly bound to someone. And to witness him ripping you away-” his own dry sob chokes out his throat. Ezra isn’t a crier, especially not in front of other people. So where was that hot rain coming from?

“I know. Fuck, I know, Ezra, I’m so sorry,” you apologize, but you aren’t sure what for. You just know that you hate seeing him so lost, so hollow, and you’d say just about anything to see him smile again.

“No - shit - no sweet firefly,” he insists. “There isn’t anything which requires your repentance. Not anything. You did so good.” A lie. You’d regressed back to that little girl that feared the roar of the ocean and the cries of the beating clouds; you hadn’t done anything valiant. But you think youlike hearing Ezra tell you how good you are for him.

Ezra flicks the tears rolling down the bank of his cheeks off to the side, trying to regain his sense of calm and center. But he’s so overwhelmed with an intense yearning to trail his fingers along your thigh, run them up the column of your throat, nose into your cheekbone and squeeze the flesh above your hip. He wants proof that you’re really here, that you’ve really been with him for all of those cycles and that, by any chance, you want him too. He wants you so bad, but he cares about you so much.

You turn your head, moving your eyes from the point in the wall that they’ve fixated, to turn to look up at Ezra. His cheeks are violently red, pretty eyes puffed up and tender. He’s slumped against the wall, eyes shutting blissfully only for him to split them back open moments later. Your heart fills with empathy and a pink honey that brings you just a blink away from bursting; he is drained too.

“Ezra, you can…” you’re hesitant to finish your sentence, not wanting to speak the words into the mold of the air so they can harden. Become something that he can hold and look back on and sneer at. So cautiously, you reach for his weeping head and carefully, with reverence, pull it to rest on your shoulder.

Ezra can’t recall a single gem being lost in vain.

You feel a searing pain in your diaphragm that feels so fucking good, and suddenly you can feel your heart beating in your throat. It grows powerful as he buries his face in your neck. He breathes into your shoulder and your pores absorb every molecule, his longing for you getting smeared into the soft fabric of your skin. He’s stolen all the air out of your lungs and locked it away into a place where he can keep revisiting the scent, leaving you no choice but to share his air.

Ezra is completely mesmerized, locked in the hypnotic trance of your essence. He’s not sure if you’ve dried his sorrows or if he wants to cry harder, because you want him too.

You want him too.

You can feel his cold tears press into you, his muscles tense and hard against your bones. In an attempt to soothe him, to pacify him the way he always does for you, your shaking fingers lift up and find solace in his hair. It’s still wet from when he washed it, the scent of his conditioner sweet and blinding, and you can’t help but turn to the side so you can bury your nose in it, inhale him.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” you whisper softly into his scalp. He huffs adoringly. His once cautious hand is now covetous, wrapping around your middle so that he can engulf you, consume you. You want to hide inside his body, and he wants to hollow himself out to make room for you to stay in him forever.

He hums lowly, tongue dripping with sleepy honey. “I do believe I’ve told you once before that you’ve nothing to repent for,” Ezra mumbles delicately into the dip above your clavicle. “Besides, pretty dove, your vexation was understandable. I hope you can perhaps forgive me one day for bartering your pickings.” Your heart melts for him; he still thinks you’re mad at him.

“Oh Ezra, I can,” you assure him, fingers still running along his scalp in a slow, steady pattern of circles. “I do. I know you were scared, and I didn’t mean to add to that. I just…I didn’t know. I didn’t know you’d do that.” Ezra giggles softly; he is a strange man indeed. You’ve never met a man that laughs so delicately, that is so easily amused and so comfortably light.

His arm squeezes tighter, bringing your side in flush against his body as he snuggles into you like a warm body pillow. You hear him yawn, you feel him yawn, his chest growing full and then hollowing out into you. Gently, your fingers grip his roots at the top of his head, trying to ease his transition into that gleamy sleep state.

“Well, stardust,” Ezra begins, getting interrupted by another wet yawn, “I suppose I have a penchant for clinging tightly to the ones I love.” Your mind is suddenly clear, your eyes wide open as your sleepiness is pulled out of your ear. Love. The ones I love. I love you.

“You love me?” you whisper, but it comes out at more of a whimper. You feel Ezra get heavier on you as he begins to droop down the front of your body, his back slumping.

“Yes, stardust,” Ezra moans through a loud yawn as his eyes shut tight. “I love you.” You feel your chest fill with something so foreign and yet so sweet, like a rose garden blooming in your heart and opening your chest cavity up. You want him to say it again and again, over and over until you forget what anything else sounds like and you can drown in the river of his love. He loves you.

You look at the beautiful man in your embrace, so exhausted. Ezra is tired of hurting, tired of longing, tired of yearning. He’s tired. So you wrap your arms around him enough to hold him up and slowly lie down onto the cot, bringing his cheek to rest right over your heart so that the now rapid beating in your throat can pacify him, mollify his aching bones so he can finally rest knowing that when he wakes up, you’ll still be there to grab at. He knows that your fingers will still be in his hair.

He knows he is wanted.


End file.
